Question : Backing up Exchange 2007 Data - Best practices

Hi all,

We are going to begin our testing period for our new Exchnage Server 2007 deployment in the company.
Small company around 40 employees

I was wondering if someone could guide me on the best way to perform data backup for the system.
We have the following systems at our disposal:
- Backup Exec
- Network Attached Storage
- Tape Backup system x 2


Any expert advice / help on this would be fantastic!
Thanks, Craig

Answer : Backing up Exchange 2007 Data - Best practices

I've not used Exchange 2007 but I have used Exchange 5.5, 2000 and 2003 in multiple environments.  2007 is not much different from a backup/recovery model perspective.

You need to make sure that Active Directory is always available, even after a disaster.  That means a reliable, off-site backup of Active Directory System State and System Partition.  This should be no more than 30 days old, and you should keep several as Exchange stores configuration information in Active Directory.

Next, you need backups of the Exchange mail databases.  This means backing up each storage group and store, and logs.  Use a product such as BackupExec 11d to give you reliable backups.  This product is suitable for your environment.  Retrospect is also a good bet.

Using networked storage is ok, but it doesn't cover you if it dies too, e.g. in a fire.  So make sure you do complete backups to tape and take them off site.  I recommend that you do a grandfather, father, son tape rotation strategy and that you do full backups at least weekly.  You can do differential or incremental backups more frequently.  We do differential backups to disk every three hours and full backups every day, with weekly and quarterly off-site rotations.

My advice, backup everything as frequently as you can afford.  It makes the system management job easier, and recovery more reliable.